For Washington-based Correspondent Don Sider, reporting this week's cover story on the state of the nation's defense required a four-week investigative campaign that included interviews with most of the Pentagon's top brass. All told, Sider met face to face with 45 military experts, including David C. Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Harold Brown; and NATO Commander Bernard W. Rogers. "There's a certain affinity that reporters and military folks have for each other," Sider observes.

"I guess anybody who wears a uniform or who carries a pen and pad his whole professional life is a Peter Pan by trade: we want to keep our toys and adventures. It makes for an understanding relationship."

For Sider that understanding runs particularly deep. He was introduced to the military at the age of six--at Wyler Military Academy in Evansville, Wis. Though his mid-1950s Army stint as a public information specialist provided little in the way of battleground adventure, his 16 months as a TIME war correspondent in Viet Nam did. Says Sider, who was wounded in the neck near the Laotian border: "It was the thrilling Hemingway life at last: danger, excitement and mud." On a working vacation last July, Sider took a flying leap into another Army experience: paratrooper training at the Fort Benning Airborne School. Says he: "I was terrified that this 46-year-old geriatric case would collapse on a two-mile run and never get up, so every night I dosed myself with aspirin and liniment. In the end, I had massive shin splints and my paratrooper wings, of which I am inordinately and shamelessly proud."

This week's cover story was written by another TIME military buff, Associate Editor Burton Pines, who received vital logistical support from Reporter-Researchers Betty Satterwhite Sutler and Beth Meyer. To keep abreast of new developments, Pines and Sutter, who have collaborated on most of TIME's defense stories over the past few years, regularly read, clip and stockpile a remarkable variety of military periodicals. "Reading Aviation Week and Strategic Review can be quite interesting," Sutter says, "once you have broken the language barrier." According to Pines, she has done exactly that. Says he: "Betty can talk throw-weights and payloads with the best of them."

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